PDP Rock Band Drum Silencers Review

RB drums making a racket and leading to eviction? We test Pelican's solution.

There's no denying that Rock Band has some highly addictive qualities. There's also no denying that the drum kit is really loud. We can testify from personal experience that you can drive downstairs neighbors crazy rocking the drums on a wooden floor, and there are even stories on the internets that a couple of people have been evicted as a result or the racket. Though the very latest versions of the RB Drum Kit are composed of somewhat softer drum pad finishes, they're still pretty noisy, and if you're stuck with a first-generation model, you'll likely admit the noise is a serious problem.

A while back, we reviewed one of the first drum-noise solutions on the market from RockBandDrumPads.com (review). The thin foam circles cover the inner drum pad area and do reduce noise to a degree, but the fact that they didn't extend over the plastic edges of the drum pads meant that plenty of loud thwacking still occurred during play. Happily though, Pelican has arrived to offer a somewhat more serious option in the form of the company's officially licensed Rock Band Drum Pad Silencers.

The $19.99 package consists of four circular and color coded pieces of foam-rubber with adhesive backing that affixes them on each of the four Rock Band drum pads. Two key points separate them from the completion. The first is the fact that they're large enough to cover the entire drum pad, including the hard plastic outer edge. The second is that they're exceptional in quality compared to other such products we've seen. The dense foam rubber that composes the silencers is relatively thick, and impressively capable of absorbing a heavy beating by drum sticks with nary a mark to show for it. From what we can tell they're unlikely to ever wear out.

Thanks to their dense thickness, the drum pad silencers really make is significant difference in the amount of noise generated by the Rock Band Drum Kit. With the pads applied, stick-strikes take on a much deeper note, and because the pads cover the hard plastic edges, the really loud stick-on-plastic collisions are eliminated completely. Even with the silencers applied the Drum Kit will still make noise, but the resulting deeper tone of drum strikes is much less annoying, and shouldn't tend to muffle the game or drive neighbors crazy like the naked pads can.

We were slightly concerned that the padding provided by Pelican's Drum Silencers would make it more difficult to get the Drum Kit to register a hit, but in our testing, we didn't encounter any problems. Since we were making much less noise while playing we felt comfortable hitting the pads a lot harder than we normally do, which was nice, and felt quite a bit more natural. Even when we purposefully experimented with drumming lightly, we didn't feel as though the Drum Silencers were getting in the way or making the Drum Kit not register our hits.

Pelican's Rock Band Drum Silencers are the best such product we've yet tested. They work, they're sturdy, and they don't look too bad either. Rock Band fans who've been banned from drumming in their homes or apartments should certainly give them a shot, as the noise reduction they provide is significant.